“The total absence of all credible testimony compels us to refuse our belief. The only evidence to be had is that extracted from the victims of the torture. But that mode of examination would have made the same persons confess that they were metempsychoses of Judas Iscariot or Pontius Pilate, that they had caused the ruinous convulsions of an earthquake or the devastations of the cholera morbus.”――_Dr. M‘Caul’s Reasons for believing that the Charge lately revived against the Jewish People is a baseless Falsehood_, pp. 16, 24. ³ See Appendix O. Earl Richard, having obtained his election as successor to the Emperor of Germany, he named himself King of the Romans. This exaltation had no favourable effect upon the unfortunate Jews. Tyranny and cruelty seem to have been the predominant features of royalty in those dark ages. He caused them to be arrested, and would not accept of any bail. The attorneys he employed were Jews, and in all probability of very indifferent characters――such as his favourite Abraham, the murderer of his own wife――who made, no effort to alleviate the oppression of their suffering brethren; perhaps helped forward their affliction by telling the Roman king they could raise the money at once, if made to do it. There can be no doubt that the Jews had then able judges and lawyers of their own, and whom the king’s court considered competent to decide all sorts of questions, spiritual as well as temporal. This circumstance annoyed the ecclesiastics not a little, which they did not fail to resent. The prelates began to complain that the Jews were protected by the king’s courts. Alas, for the protection! Boniface, the primate, who was honoured with the well-merited appellations of “this ruffian, this cruel smiter ... no winner of souls, but an exacter of money,”¹ convened a provincial synod, in which the prelates enacted several severe and cruel edicts respecting the Jews, which are the following:―― ¹ M. Paris. A. Strickland. “That because ecclesiastical judicature is confounded, and the office of prelates obstructed, when a Jew offending against ecclesiastical persons and things is convicted of these or other matters, which belong to the ecclesiastical court of pure right, and yet is not permitted by the king’s sheriffs or bailiffs to stand to the ecclesiastical law, but is rather forced to betake himself to the king’s court; therefore all such Jews shall be driven to make answer, in such cases, before a judge ecclesiastical, by being forbidden to traffic, contract, or converse with the faithful: and they who forbid and obstruct them, and distress judges and others on this account, shall be coerced by the sentences of excommunication and interdict.”